


When Four Became Five

by cecilia095



Category: New Girl
Genre: Babies, F/M, Family, Family Feels, Future Fic, Miller Family 'Verse, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:07:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24886588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cecilia095/pseuds/cecilia095
Summary: "Nick, I'm pregnant.""Like, with akid?"
Relationships: Jessica Day/Nick Miller
Comments: 3
Kudos: 161





	When Four Became Five

**Author's Note:**

> Loosely based on my fics ['Kindergarten Blues'](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5422922) and ['Not the Way That I Do Love You'](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5830480) because I love me some Girl-Dad!Nick and an 'Oops' baby and this family 'verse, which I recently revisited out of boredom. You don't have to have read those fics to read this one, though! I just love the Miller Girls. <3

"Hey, kiddos."

"Hi Daddy," his oldest, Elsie, casually replies. She doesn't dare to look up from her Barbie Dreamhouse Mess — thirty, forty Barbies from over five years of asking and begging everyone she knows for a new Barbie doll; every Christmas, every birthday, every ' _I was a good girl today, wasn't I, Daddy_?' — and instead just takes her two-year-old sister by the chubby, little hand and directs her on where exactly to place Ken. "No, he goes _in there_ , Charlotte, not _there_ , seeeeeeeeee?" she explains, sounding every bit like her mother in this moment, pointing to the only room sans a Barbie doll in the Dreamhouse.

Charlotte opts for wordlessly sticking Ken's arm in her mouth instead, and Nick walks over to his youngest daughter and scoops her up in his arms, planting a kiss on her head. The best part of his day is coming home to his girls, and his wife, and — "Hey," he pauses, ignoring Ken's inevitable fall from Charlotte's hands to the ground as he hoists her higher up on his hip. He and Jess will clean the living room up once the kids go to bed, only for them to make the same damn mess tomorrow. This ‘kids’ thing is an endless cycle, really. "Where's Mommy?"

"Umm... well... umm... she..." Elsie, still very much distracted by her Barbie pile, takes a long moment to think on what to tell her dad, as if Jess wandered out of the loft six hours ago and never returned or something. "She’s in her room. I think Mommy’s _upset_ , Daddy.”

“Upset? What makes you say that?” he asks.

Elsie shrugs — casually, nonchalantly, distracted by the tutu she’s trying to shove onto the Ken doll that just fell from her little sister’s hands — and says, “Dunno. She was cryin’, though.”

“ _Crying_?”

“Uh-huh,” Elsie confirms. "I said, 'Are you sad, Mommy'? and she just told me to go play dolls with Charlotte, so that's what I'm doin'."

Nick raises a brow at that. Most nights, Jess is right there in the middle of the Barbie Mess with the girls, usually giving Barbie Number Twelve an overly-animated voice and a dedicated background story, which Elsie appreciates more than anything. Jess could find a way to bring a Polly Pocket _shoe_ to life, most days. Tonight, Nick isn't even sure she's actually even in the damn house. Everything past the living room is creepily silent for a loft that’s usually filled with the playful shrieks and giggles of his three girls.

With Charlotte still in his arms, he makes his way down the hallway and into their bedroom. "Jess?" he whispers, pushing the door open with his free hand. 

Jess is sitting at the edge of their unmade bed — two kids later and you don't make the bed some days, _whatever_ — folding the girls' clothes into separate piles. She's not even humming to herself like she usually would be when she does the laundry.

She barely looks up at him. “Hey. I didn’t hear you come in.” 

“That’s because I didn’t bust my ass —” he widens his eyes and remembers the two-year-old in his grip who'll mock any curse word he blurts out, correcting himself quickly. “My _butt_ ,” he says, “on the mess of toys in the middle of our floor like I usually do.”

Jess would normally laugh at that; the image of Nick tripping over the trillions of toys their girls have acquired throughout their little lives. Instead, she just shrugs and says, “Oh. There’s pasta on the stove, if you’re hungry.”

“I ate at work, but thanks.” He sets their toddler down onto the bed by Jess, inches away from the growing laundry pile his wife is vigorously stacking tiny little clothes onto. “Uh, Jess, Elsie told me you were crying before. You - you okay?”

She pauses mid-fold, holding Charotte’s yellow, daisy-patterned jumper up against her middle and letting out a deep, dramatic, in-character sigh, looking like she’s almost searching for the right thing to say in lieu of blurting her words out like she normally does. She’s the talker, the over-sharer, the confident half of their parental and marital duo — usually.

“She told you that?” Jess queries, standing up.

Nick scratches the side of his cheek. “Well, yeah...”

Jess knows there’s no point in denying the matter now that it’s been confirmed by their brutally honest seven-year-old. Elsie, much like the mini-version of her mother only with the cutest little half-lisp you'll ever hear and her dad's vividly descriptive storytelling skills, over shares everything — and then some.

_“Uncle Schmidt, I heard Mommy say she’s banning thex ‘til Daddy starts puttin’ down the toilet seat. Do_ you _know what thex is?”_

“I have to show you something, but you can’t freak out, okay?”

“If it’s the toilet seat, it wasn’t me! It was Charlotte!” he cries, wasting no time pinning the blame on their sweet, innocent two-year-old who’s sitting on the bed happily unfolding the laundry Jess probably spent the last four hours sorting. 

“It’s not the toilet seat, it’s —” 

Nick watches Jess take both of her hands and slowly run them through her hair, stopping to rub both of her temples. She looks like she’s about to lose it, and he wonders which one of the girls broke or destroyed something important from his office today. He starts thinking about his Bears helmet, the ‘Tug of War Champion - 1991’ trophy from summer camp still proudly displayed on his desk, his Kermit the Frog figurine kept from a Happy Meal over thirty years ago. Is it the 90’s Walkman he still won’t let his wife throw away despite her many protests and failed attempts? Maybe they somehow got onto his laptop and deleted the fourth draft of his still-unfinished zombie novel from ten years ago. Whatever it is, whoever broke it, they can fix it; they’re a family, and they’re everything to him, even if having kids means you can’t exactly have nice things because they get their grubby little hands on everything you’ve ever owned.

“I’m just… I’m just gonna come out and say it,” she says after a long moment. “Nick, I’m pregnant.”

Well, better than the kids breaking a meaningless trophy from 1991, right?

“You’re —” He stutters, not exactly able to find the right words, because he can’t help being caught off guard by the information his wife just blurted out. The girls are all he’s ever needed, and she expressed once or twice about how as much as she’d love seeing her husband with a little Miller boy on his shoulders, she was pretty sure she was done having babies, that they both had just one sibling each growing up and it was _fine_ , and — “Like, with a _kid_?”

“No, with a _turtle_ , Nick,” she retorts, letting out a huff and walking over to their bed to stop Charlotte from messily unfolding any more of the clean laundry, scooping her up in her arms. “Yes, with another one of _these_ ,” she confirms, patting Charlotte’s butt. “I know, I’m freaked out too.”

“We didn’t plan this,” is all Nick manages to say.

“Obviously not,” she agrees. “You think I _enjoy_ morning sickness, swollen ankles, twenty-four hours of labor, and nine months of Schmidt bugging me to just cave and have a gender reveal party because he’s desperate to know the sex of a child who isn’t even his?”

"Cece and Schmidt's gender reveal party was worse than Winston's cat's third birthday, and I mean that."

"So boring, but that pink cake was _superb_."

He nods in agreement. “Also, everyone knows the best part of havin’ a kid is not knowing what’s about to pop out; it's half the fun,” Nick continues, remembering his surprised albeit ecstatic reactions when both of his children came out _not-male_ like he’d guessed they both were the entire time Jess was pregnant. 

“Exactly.” Jess levels a hand at him, his comment causing her to almost entirely forget the panicked state she’d been in just a few hours ago when she took four — she appreciates accuracy, okay? — pregnancy tests that all quickly confirmed the suspicions she’d had over the last few weeks. 

“Um, so are you, are we okay?”

Nick furrows his brows and just stares at her silently.

“Because I know — I know having another baby wasn’t in the plans, at all, but I’m okay if you’re okay, and if you’re not, that’s — that’s okay, too; we’ll figure it out, like we always do,” she rambles. "I've kind of been freaking out all day over this. I wasn't sure how I felt about a third baby, how _you_ would feel, how —”

“Jess.” He bites the inside of his cheek and walks over closer to his wife, who’s still got their youngest daughter on her hip. Something about the image of Jess stopping everything she's doing to lovingly carry their baby girls in her arms even when she's tasked with five loads of laundry gets him, every time. “There’s no one else I’d rather spend my life cleanin’ up Barbie Dreamhouse messes with.”

“So we’re okay?” she asks nervously.

“Jess, of course we’re okay. I mean, I wasn’t — I didn’t think we’d go through this again, but why wouldn’t I be okay with it? I’m kinda pumped about havin’ another little one with you.” His wife smiles at that. It's probably one of the first times she's smiled all day, he suspects. “Plus, this is just further proof that my sperm is superior to all of our friends’. Can I text the guys about it yet?” 

“Not yet. Wait ‘till I tell Cece, at least.”

“Ugh. Fine."

“And hey, they’ll grow out of the Barbie phase eventually,” she says, stifling a laugh, then presses a noisy kiss to Charlotte’s cheek. 

“This one,” he starts, pausing to press a palm to her middle, causing Charlotte to look down at the source of the disturbance on Jess’s torso, grinning around the thumb she's sucking on, “isn’t gonna like Barbies all that much, ‘cause I’m finally gettin’ my boy.”

*****

About seven months later, after only four-and-a-half grueling hours of labor, Nick watches fuzzy, brown hair and then a wailing, pink, beautiful baby slide out of his wife’s exhausted body. It’s the third time he’s done this, witnessed one of his and his Jess's little creations enter their lives, and yet it still feels like the very first time.

"Hey, where's his...", Nick pauses to crank his head up further, to carefully observe his third child's entrance into the world, all while still holding one of Jess's legs down like the doctor asked him to when the pushing started. "That's _not_ a boy, doc."

"No, it's definitely not," the doctor confirms, looking at Nick with a cheeky smile. "Congratulations! It's a girl!"

"A girl?" Jess asks with a tired breath, only slightly picking up her head from the back of the hospital bed to get a look at their newest addition, her eyes welling with happy tears at the sight of her third daughter being lifted up into her view. "Oh my God, another girl. Another _girl_ , Nick."

"I owe Schmidt so much money."

"You two _need_ to stop betting on our kids' genders for enjoyment," Jess says, waving her husband over to her side as the nurses get Baby Miller Number Three cleaned off and ready for her parents' arms.

Nick doesn't hesitate, smoothing a hand over Jess's sweaty forehead and then leaning down to place his lips to her temple. "Hey. You did it. Again."

"I know. That was _definitely_ the last time."

"You said that when Charlotte was born, honey," he reminds her.

A minute later, their littlest baby girl is in Jess's arms. Nick is beside the two of them, his butt half-on the hospital bed as he stares at his newest daughter in complete awe.

"We make perfect kids, Jessica," he says in a soft voice after a few minutes of just staring at their baby, his thumb idly stroking her delicate little hand.

Jess looks away from the baby for a second to look up at him. "Even if you didn't get your boy?" she jokes.

He scrunches his nose, thinking about their newest little girl and the two they've got at home. It's more than he's ever seen for himself; it's all he really could ever want. "Don't need him. It's you, me, and a lifetime of freakin' Barbies."


End file.
